Its evening. All “worker bees” have retired to their “hives”. Its time for some rest, some leisure, some family time. But there is someone in a little apartment round the corner who seems to be very busy. And anxious.
The someone happens to be an 18-year-old girl called Payal searching for something. She is ransacking the entire apartment. The thing must be a very precious one. But no, its nothing precious. Actually, it IS precious. It is precious to HER. It’s a set of Tom & Jerry comic books. It might sound weird but its true; she is searching the house like an Income Tax officer for a set of comics. She had collected those when she about 4 or 5 years old. No, she didn’t go crying to her mother or her maternal grandparents and plead them to buy those. She got them as free gift every time she got a packet of “Brittania Treat ” cream biscuits. Some of the books she got from her maternal uncle who also liked those biscuits.
There was a time when Payal with her family lived in rented home and used to change houses after 6 to 7 years. When it would be time to leave from rented house to another, her mother would pack everything up, ready to be moved and unpacked on settling in the new house. But since Payal had grown up and matured, she didn’t unpack those comics. While changing houses multiple times, some little things might get misplaced. Its natural. Those comics might have been some of them. With time Payal had forgotten about them.
Its been 3 years since Payal’s family has shifted to their own permanent apartment. And today, all of a sudden she recollects about those comics. First she asks her mother about them. But her mother has forgotten where she had kept them. And then begins her investigation.
Its been about an hour but no results. She is sad, sometimes anxious and sometimes irritated. Any third person would think she is looking for some treasure, some gold or similar stuffs. Who will anticipate that those little books are much more precious to her than gold ????